The kind of questions a person asks can tell you a lot about their intelligence.
Perhaps the most defining trait of smart people is that they want to learn the principles, the fundamental ideas behind something more than the specifics.
They can work out the specifics for themselves once they get the concepts.
I use the word “principle” here to mean “concepts” and not moral values.
Concepts are nothing but the ideas that are the underlying rationale for doing something.
Principles are probably the most important thing in any endeavor.
There are quite a few ways to go wrong with principles.
It might be simply not having any principles, or having unsound principles you’ve never thought through but simply copied off someone, or having principles but not using them.
Foundations
I might be wrong or condescending, but I get the impression that too many people operate without any principles at all.
I’d guess it’s because having principles is a lot of work.
You have to think about what you’re doing, whether it’s likely to work, and why it will or won’t.
We’re lucky that we don’t have to solve every problem from scratch though.
Any path you take, there are always plenty of people who’ve already forged the path by doing great work.
There’s nothing wrong in analyzing their principles.
In fact, it’d be stupid not to learn from them, for you’ll grind simply to re-invent what they’ve done.
Newton himself “saw farther because he stood on the shoulder of giants”.
Even then, it’s not as simple as reading a book or listening to a talk where someone shares their principles.
It always comes down to intellectual effort – a principle is worthless if you don’t own it. If you don’t make it your own.
Ownership involves thinking and reasoning it out.
“This makes sense because…”
It takes a lot of time and effort to develop ownership and come up with your own principles.
You know you’ve got a principle when you begin to see the idea, and more importantly, to use it, everywhere.
That’s the nature of principles; core foundational ideas that you apply to different situations.
They’re like Lego pieces; you build different structures at different times, but you use the same underlying pieces.
And if you really understand something, you can apply it nearly anywhere.
Mathematics, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science – all of these have powerful ideas you can use everyday, and they’re mostly intuitive, almost common sense (Farnam Street’s The Great Mental Models has a list of these).
Learn Principles
If I have to learn something, I’d much rather it be a principle or concept than a random fact.
So I would recommend – if you have to ask something, try to understand the principles instead of the specifics.
That’s how you learn to learn – instead of memorizing a solution to a specific problem, learn the idea behind the solution, and you can apply it anywhere you want.
If you’re learning weightlifting, it’s better to learn how to select exercises – to understand what you should look for – than to ask if you should do a particular exercise. You can figure out what exercises to do yourself then.
If you’re preparing for an exam, it’s better to understand how you should prepare, instead of asking if you should read a specific book. You can figure out what books to read yourself then.
A principle is modular and therefore scalable – and thus powerful. You can use it anywhere.
Learn the principles and you can figure out the specifics yourself and find your own way.
Learn how to exercise and you can come up with your own routines; learn how to study and you can come up with your own book list.
It’s nothing but the idea of teaching someone to fish, rather than giving them fish.
Unfortunately, it seems like too many people would rather be fed fish than learning how to fish themselves.